Grow up and perish like the summer fly,
Heads without names, no more remembered.
Hazlitt insisted that Shakespeare’s principles were aristocratic, chiefly, I believe, because of his handling of the tribunes and the plebs in “Coriolanus.” Shakespeare does treat his mobs with a kindly and amused contempt. They are fickle, ignorant, illogical, thick-headed, easily imposed upon. Still he makes you feel that they are composed of good fellows at bottom, quickly placated and disposed to do the fair thing. I think that Shakespeare’s is the more democratic nature; that his distrust of the people is much less radical than Milton’s. Walt Whitman’s obstreperous democracy, his all-embracing camaraderie, his liking for the warm, gregarious pressure of the crowd, was a spirit quite alien from his whose “soul was like a star and dwelt apart.” Anything vulgar was outside or below the sympathies of this Puritan gentleman. Falstaff must have been merely disgusting to him; and fancy him reading Mark Twain! In Milton’s references to popular pastimes there is always a mixture of disapproval, the air of the superior person. “The people on their holidays,” says Samson, are “impetuous, insolent, unquenchable.” “Methought,” says the lady in “Comus,”
. . . it was the sound
Of riot and ill managed merriment,
Such as the jocund flute or gamesome pipe
Stirs up among the loose, unlettered hinds
When, for their teeming flocks and granges full,
In wanton dance they praise the bounteous Pan
And thank the gods amiss.